Sylvia
dir. Christine Jeffs

Opens Fri Oct 31.

Sylvia could have been a terrible movie, and it is not, but it is somehow profoundly dull. It assumes, as such movies do, that the end product of art can be reduced to an equation of inspiration plus motivation, a cause-and-effect relationship, and even that such things can be rendered cinematically at all. Like so many of what are loosely termed film biographies of artists and writers, it limps along, establishing not characters so much as canonical scenes (Pollock did something very similar). There is the moment that Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, two poets not yet famous, meet; she bites his cheek, he steals her earring. There is the rise of Ted's career and Sylvia's frustration; there is her suicide attempt, here imagined as an intimate post-coupling confession; there is the moment, straight out of Plath's journals, when she sees Hughes talking to a pretty young student and, caught up short, begins to suspect his infidelities. The parts of the story that are not as historically clear rely on those old cinematic tropes of troubled genius: the piles of crumpled paper, the outbursts, the final terrible inspiration.

The problem with this story--in spite of the controversy, fueled by Plath and Hughes biographers, about who was to blame in the long-winded dissolution of their marriage (Was he a devil? Was she a shrew?)--is that Plath's poetry is still more interesting than her life, no matter how cinematically you portray it, no matter how attractive the actors, a problem unfortunately accentuated by the addition of a sexy last-minute reunion between Plath and Hughes that will drive purist scholars straight into their cups. Gwyneth Paltrow's Plath is not heresy, but her draggy delivery is exhausting to watch, and she emotes even in her most contained mad-lady-poet scenes. In any case, such a movie should make you run, not walk, to a bookstore, and Sylvia does not. It tells a self-contained story that has nothing to do with poetry. Sylvia Plath should not be known far and wide as the poet whose husband cheated on her; so you see that there is more than one way to kill a writer. EMILY HALL

Alien: Director's Cut
dir. Ridley Scott
Opens Fri Oct 31.

Back in 1979, when I was about 10 and living in Washington, D.C., I read in the local newspapers that the movie Alien was so scary that it made a woman faint. More impressive yet, she had to be carried out on a stretcher. The very idea that a film could do such a thing--make someone lose consciousness and end up in an emergency room--deeply impressed me. I wanted to see this movie, but couldn't because I was too young for its R rating. As a consequence, I did not watch Alien until I was 30. And what I discovered and enjoyed then, and what I still enjoyed when I watched the director's cut recently, was not the horror sequences that caused the woman to faint (indeed, those scenes are now the cause of laughter rather than fear, as they're so obvious) but the way the director, Ridley Scott, captured the ordinariness of space travel.

Star Wars, which was released two years before Alien, imagined space travel in operatic terms. Spaceships, even junk spaceships like the Millennium Falcon, zoomed and zipped through the stars. The slow spaceship whose wasted gothic bulk fills the opening of Alien, Nostromo, is a regular piece of junk. And by making the ship's interior so realistic, with rooms that are inhabited by contracted workers rather than heroic star-fighters, Scott made space travel realistic. It was easy to insert yourself into the life of the dingy mining ship Nostromo.

So, it's the first quarter of this film that amazes me, even to this day. After the introduction--the crew awakening from deep sleep, their visit to the forbidden planet, from which they receive what they think is a distress signal (but in actuality is a warning), and their departure from the planet--the movie becomes unreal and mechanical. But I still wonder--which shocking scene (John Hurt's stomach rupture? Tom Skerritt's airshaft sequence? Ian Holm's getting beat down to a white pulp by an angry black man?) made the poor woman faint? CHARLES MUDEDE

Die Mommie Die!
dir. Mark Rucker

Opens Fri Oct 31.

If, like me, you were disappointed that Psycho Beach Party didn't feature more of Charles Busch, then you are in luck. Busch is the star of Die Mommie Die!, playing Angela Arden, a faded 1950s star who is hated by both her producer husband (played with bastardly relish by Philip Baker Hall) and shrewish daughter (Natasha Lyonne, star of But I'm a Cheerleader). That's right: Charles Busch is a man playing a woman; he's a hilarious drag queen or female impersonator or whatever the correct term is. Let's say actor and writer (he received a Tony nomination for writing The Tale of the Allergist's Wife), because it comes closest to bottling the lightning of his talent.

After Angela's husband discovers her relationship with actor-gigolo Tony Parker (Jason Priestley), he threatens to turn her into a virtual prisoner of their home and cuts off her spending. What's a girl to do? She promptly, and cleverly, offs him under the suspicious eyes of her pious maid (played by Frances Conroy of Six Feet Under), resentful daughter, and addled slutty queer son (Stark Sands). I'm not a spoiler by revealing any of this because it's only the springboard for the pretzel plot twists, reversals, and outrageously funny camp that follow, for Die Mommie Die! is packed with witty banter and drop-dead set pieces that simultaneously pay homage to and send up B movies, Douglas Sirk's melodramas, and '50s boilerplate women's pictures. And Busch is the perfect leading lady for it. NATE LIPPENS